Re: [tomato] Tomato Digest V1 #154
Thomas Giannou (Tomato@GlobalGarden.com)
Fri, 26 Feb 1999 12:20:23 -0800
I've been growing beef steak tomato's for several years... mainly because my
wife really likes them. I retired last year and started one of those "honey
do" projects of transplanting all my raspberry plants. A friend gave me
some Bio-Vam mycorrhiza he had obtained from his friend, Mike Brock, who is
the inventor of the product.
It worked so well on my raspberries... the treated plants grew 15 inch
branches while the untreated did very little during the cold month of May
1998. Well, I bought 16 gallons (its like a sand based product) of the
Mycorrhiza inoculant and started a small business selling it to people. I
tried it on the beef steak tomato plants and a pepper plant and a cherry
tomato plant along with my lawn and some strawberry plants. I took pictures
of all of them as they progressed and put them on my internet site that I
have been developing (perpetually it seems like.) My little business was
mainly with relatives, close friends and neighbors and an aquaintance or
two. The business has started to grow and now I'm a "distributor" and still
retired. I have tried inoculants from other companies and they worked but
not as fast. One of my "dozens of observations" with this stuff is that the
health of all the plants I tried it on was really increased. I also noticed
that the time to maturity had greatly decreased. My raspberries came on two
weeks early. My green peppers were a month early. My tomato's were a month
early. And our Quinault strawberry plants which are an everbearing
strawberry plant, didn't stop producing all summer. I was putting this
stuff on everything I planted in the garden and on all the house plants.
For the first time in years, I was really having a lot of fun gardening. I
noticed something else as time progressed last year.... the weeds were going
away. I didn't pull a single dandelion out of my Raspberry patches last
year... they don't like to grow where mycorrhiza is plentiful. I put that
stuff on my lawn and I found only four small dandelions in the lawn all
summer long. I have so many stories about this stuff and my observations
that I could fill a book with all the experiences. I'm really looking
forward to this coming season.
My brother came over and I took him on the "neighborhood tour." We went to
the neighbor's strawberry patch first... they were sweet and juicy
berries... I can taste them just writing about them. Then I gave him a
tomato off their pear tomato plant. He doesn't like tomato's because of
their acid taste. Well, he sure liked those pear tomato's. They used a
teaspoon of Bio-Vam Mycorrhiza on their pear tomato plant. I put up two
seven foot metal fence posts beside that plant. And I then wired a wood
rail across the top. Then I pulled the vines from that tomato plant up over
the rail and tied them up. These vines were about 8 feet long. That one
plant was about 10 feet wide and three feet thick and had hundreds of pear
tomato's on it and was producing like crazy all summer long and all the way
into the frost time here in Spokane which was late last year... towards the
end of October. Then I took him over to my place and we muched through
cherry tomato's and raspberries and strawberries... they were all sweet and
excellent tasting. The Mycorrhiza really raises the quality of what is
produced. I've been around strawberries, raspberries, tomato's, peppers,
onions, cucumbers, squash, lettuce and a lot of other plants for years and I
have never tasted anything better than what is produced by having a little
mycorrhiza on those plants last year.
You can see the pictures on my web site at http://www.tandjenterprises.com
I have been doing a lot of my own experimenting with this stuff and have
done a lot of work with writing down my observations and taking pictures. I
am absolutely convinced that mycorrhiza inoculants combined with a good
organic fertilizer and organic material in a garden... both from the point
of view of home gardeners and commercial growers... is a replacement for the
use of chemical fertilizers and many other chemical products. I was
talking to a person at the Washington State Department of Agriculture
yesterday and they were saying that 60-70% of the ground water pollutants
come from home lawns and gardens. Mycorrhiza inoculants combined with a
good organic fertilizer will stop all of that and have a much higher level
of performanc with plants.
There are a lot of different species of mycorrhiza in the soils. It's a
natural product and there is tons of research being done with it and new
discoveries published on an annual basis in a variety of scientific
journals. I have documented some findings that many in the field have never
seen before... I'm not a scientist... just a fellow retired from working
with computers and I love gardening and have been blessed with an ability to
observe things. Scientists in their experiments usually have a "tunnel
visision" because they generally are constrained to look at specific
details. But us "gardener types" are less constrained and have a wider
perspective of things that sometimes allows us to pick up details of things
going on with plants and in the soils.
For example: I have found that earthworm populations have significantly
increased in soils where plants were treated with VAM fungi inoculants.
Their habitat is mainly limited to the root zone of those plants. Well,
with mycorrhiza added to a plant's roots, it's root zone can be increased by
as much as 1,500%. As the roots get deeper into the soil, there is less
requirement for water to be added because the plant can get at sources of
water that were previously out of reach. So, your water cost will go
down.... 50% cut is not unusual. It's one of those things that vary from
one location to another because it is tied closely to the soil conditions at
any given site. Here in the Pacific Northwest, where our volcanic and often
sandy soils are dominat, VAM fungi thrive with garden plants, fruit trees,
lawns, etc.
Best Regards,
Thomas Giannou
-----Original Message-----
From: Shantihhh@aol.com <Shantihhh@aol.com>
To: Tomato@GlobalGarden.com <Tomato@GlobalGarden.com>
Date: Friday, February 26, 1999 10:50 AM
Subject: Re: [tomato] Tomato Digest V1 #154
>
>In a message dated 2/26/99 11:23:46 AM,
owner-tomato-digest@GlobalGarden.com
>writes:
>
><<Bio-Vam mycorrhiza inoculant>>
>
>Please tell me more about this? Wow one month earlier!
>
>Mary-Anne
>USDA zone 9B
>Sunset 14/15
>